Billionaires Aim to Make Trillions Mining Asteroids

A group of investors including Google's Larry Page and X Prize founder Peter Diamandis is launching a new venture called Planetary Resources, aimed to mine asteroids for resources such as water and platinum.

First came space exploration. Then came space tourism. But the next big thing in space is the exploitation of resources, specifically precious metals and water mined from asteroids. So says a group of billionaire investors and its crack team of already-successful space entrepreneurs and former top NASA engineers.

Planetary Resources, headed by Space Adventures founder Eric Anderson and X Prize founder Peter Diamandis, will announce in Seattle today an ambitious plan to identify, explore, tag, and eventually mine some of the thousands of asteroids within 5 million to 10 million miles away and which contain valuable resources. "Much of human exploration has been driven by humanity's search for resources," Diamandis tells PM. "The value proposition of going after resources has fueled humanity and allowed it to make the large investments required to open frontiers." The space frontier, he says, will be opened the same way.

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Water is one of the top materials that extraterrestrial resource-hunters will target. It would be valuable to future space missions as both life support and and drinking water for astronauts, and as the material for rocket fuel, which can be made from water's constituent elements of hydrogen and oxygen. They also hope to obtain platinum-group metals, which are abundant in asteroids. Diamandis estimates that a single 500-meter-wide asteroid could contain as much platinum and other rare (on Earth) metals than have been mined in all of history.

"Commercial space started with communication satellites, and it's continuing with space tourism, that I have been fortunately part of," Simonyi said in a statement before today's announcement. "I think that the next step is going to be the exploration and commercialization of space resources."

Former NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) engineer and Mars mission director Chris Lewicki leads the company's technical team, for which he cherry-picked a number of his former JPL colleagues. "Landing spacecraft on another planet is one of the most exciting and rewarding things that you can ever do," he tells PM. "That being said . . . it's a been there, done that experience . . . . It's very fun to do it once, it's fun to do it twice, but when you have an opportunity like we have at Planetary Resources, where we can redefine how it can be done, that's something that's really attractive to people who have done things like land on Mars before."

Illustration of Leo space telescope. Credit: Planetary Resources.

For its first project, Planetary Resources is already building a spacecraft called Leo at the company's Seattle headquarters. Leo (the acronym for low-Earth orbit, where the spacecraft will be stationed) will carry a telescope to scout the sky for promising targets for later exploration. In the future, a swarm of low-cost robots (Lweicki promises something an order of magnitude cheaper than anything attempted before) will visit target asteroids and study them up close—and perhaps place beacons to aid future mining 'bots. Anderson says: "Imagine sending a 50- or 100-kilogram spacecraft, or a swarm of them, to a near-Earth object and being able to do so for tens of millions of dollars, totally, inclusive . . . You could map out a series of targets, 10 or 20 targets, for the cost of a previous Mars landing mission."

Michael Belfiore is the author of Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space and is a frequent contributor to Popular Mechanics.